Managing Urban Air Quality (Chicago)

Managing Urban Air Quality (Chicago)

Array of Things (AoT) provides application developers with near-real time, high spatial-temporal resolution data about urban air quality, weather, and other factors. AoT provides tech/service developers with an urban scale testbed to embed new technologies and services in the built infrastructure.

Project milestone

In Development

Idea Complete

Prototype Complete

In Development

Deployed

Commercialized

Impact statement

This project is investigating how cities might optimize air quality by managing traffic flow, for instance, via schedules or temporary routing. This requires understanding of the spatial and temporal dynamics of urban air contaminants, particularly related to vehicle emissions, and in the context of diverse weather, natural topology, and built form of cities. The project leverages Chicago’s Array of Things (AoT) initiative, which uses resilient embedded systems technology developed at Argonne National Laboratory. The AoT provides an urban scale testbed to embed new technologies and services in the built infrastructure, enabling application developers to access near-real time, high spatial-temporal resolution data about urban air quality, weather, and other factors. Deploying technologies in urban spaces is costly, so the project leverages existing street furniture, integrating AoT’s air quality and environmental sensors into solar powered, networked waste stations built by BigBelly, a waste solutions company. BigBelly operates nearly 30,000 waste stations in cities globally, and provides a vehicle through which sensors can be deployed in many diverse urban settings. The project brings together computer science, cyber physical systems, distributed systems, and sensor systems expertise to explore technical and societal challenges and opportunities of urban-scale embedded systems in the public sphere, initially related to understanding and ultimately managing urban air quality.

Acknowledgements

UrbanCCD's Array of Things project is supported with funding from Argonne National Laboratory and in-kind support from the City of Chicago, the University of Chicago, and eight industry partners.

Related Apps

TEAM NAME

TEAM

ABOUT THE TEAM

UrbanCCD is a center within the Computation Institute of the University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory. UrbanCCD partners span over a dozen universities, with projects focused on using computation, data analytics, and embedded systems to understand and address near- and long-term urban challenges and opportunities.

WE'RE LOOKING FOR

We are looking for partners interested in helping to develop and test the system at scale in Chicago and eventually other cities.